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During yesterday's trading, the Dollar dropped against all the major currencies. The Dollar dropped as much as 100 pips at one point against the EUR on Thursday, and saw bearish trends against the Pound and the Yen as well.

The Dollar weakened yesterday as a result of series of negative economic data releases. The U.S Retails Sales unexpectedly dropped by 0.1% in July, failing to reach expectations to rise by 1.8%. The U.S Core Retails Sales dropped by 0.6% in July too. The difference between the two reports is that the core report measures the change in the total value of sales at the retail level, excluding automobiles, due to the high volatility of automobile sales. The fact that both indices showed negative figures proves that American consumers are still cautious regarding their expenses, lacking the confidence that the worst of the recession is behind us

The other important release that helped push down the Dollar on Thursday was the weekly Unemployment Claims report which showed that 558,000 individuals filed for unemployment insurance for the first time during the past week. Both the negative Retails Sales data and the poor employment figures showed that the U.S economy is yet to pull out of recession, and thus the Dollar weakened as the trading day progressed.

Looking ahead to today, the leading data seems to be the Consumer Price Indices (CPI). The CPI measures the change in price of goods and services purchased by consumers, and thus act as a leading inflation gauge. Traders are advised to focus their attention on the Core CPI report, which excludes food and energy prices, as it tends to deliver a more reliable figure. Current forecasts suggest that prices have stayed quite stable during July. It appears that if the actual result will be similar or slightly better, it may correct some of yesterday's losses for the Dollar. However, in case of a worse-than-expected result, the Dollar is likely to continue tumbling.